SUBMISSION AND FREEDOM

In Arabic, Islam means “submission.” As with devout Christians, Buddhists and others of faith, they recognize that surrendering the self to a larger One is the ultimate act of liberation. Only by surrendering to God, they reason, does one find the strength to resist submitting to any man out of fear of death or lesser punishment.

The lessons of Iran should not be lost on the leaders of the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world. We are witnessing once again the violent attempt to suppress the will of the People of Iran by a religious leader once exalted by the masses for his piety and wisdom. To many outside observers in the West, it is astonishing that so many people who have known secular government would surrender their freedom so easily to any one man. The only religious autocrat to have ever served his People wisely was Mohammad, whose followers resorted to murder immediately after his death in order to gain control of the power that he had wielded so wisely and justly, praised be his name.

The Shah was a fascist autocrat and the will of the People was done in removing him from the Puppet throne. The mistake was in replacing one autocratic regime for another. While Iran has some of the trappings of a democracy, mass resistance to illegal vote tampering is put down with violent force. Demonstrating in solidarity with the Egyptian revolutionaries has now produced the same result. It is in giving away the power of the People to any man that we lose our ability to determine our individual and collective destinies.

The situation is closely analogous to how fascism has taken root in the United States. In a nation still suffering from the trauma of the Vietnam war and Watergate, we chose a smiling representative of the corporatocracy whose infectious grin caused us to instinctively like him better than a man who had finally taken on the difficult work America had abandoned after the political murder of John F. Kennedy for trying to undermine the forces of fascism in the United States and the world.

Carter was not a perfect President. None has ever been, although those whose visages grace the cliffs of Mount Rushmore deserve all the praise they have been given. Carter did not apply evenly the doctrine that the interests of peace always trump corporate interests, but he came close. I believe that when an objective observer looks at the plans that he had started to implement that he or she cannot help but see what a visionary Carter was and is.

Despite extensive televised hearings on the Iran-Contra scandal that revealed how Reagan’s October surprise was a back-door deal with someone in authority in Iran to order the release of the hostages, few seem to realize that the Ayatollah must have been involved in authorizing the deal. This makes him complicit in dealing with the CIA, who late in the Revolution had given up resisting the exit of the Shah. Can this be coincidence? One has to wonder how much of the apparently insane behavior of the Iranian government has been orchestrated by the CIA on behalf of the international corporate terrorists whose ultimate aim he knows to be to remove him from power to be replaced by another of their Puppets.

Reagan was so popular that his complicity in the coup that took Carter out was ignored. Marine Colonel Oliver North testified that he had committed treason before Congress and the world, yet he is a “free” man. A true Muslim or Christian would say otherwise. North like too many of us is a prisoner of the tribal mentality that is the ultimate cause and justification for the crime of war. 

Whether the “tribe” is a nation, a cultural group, a religion or even a family is irrelevant. In this time of unprecedented global interconnectedness, we are all citizens of the world and world leaders should be our servants, not our masters. Kurt Vonnegut coined the term "granfaloon" to describe the artificial groups into which we divide ourselves out of fear of being considered outside of them. This is the reason few of us are free, even within our own minds. To quote Vonnegut: "If you wish to study a granfaloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon."

We can only stop the imposition of a fascist New World Order by demanding as a unified citizenry of the world that we create a democratic New World Order instead. The UN is a puppet government because if the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council. Those who direct the actions of the Ambassadors of the council are representing the interests not of the world but of the international corporate terrorists who are competing in a massive game of Risk to determine who will be the Bankers in the game of Monopoly that they are playing. 

The Monopoly money they are using is worth nothing but what they determine it is worth. Since wealth is created by workers, that means that they get to determine what we are worth and how little it will take to appease us so that we do not take to the streets in open revolt. Slow to change their mindset, they are still playing by old rules that the free Peoples of the world are rewriting faster than they can respond with their usual tools of bribery, brutality, murder and war. It is time that together, we end this game of Risk so that we can resume a game of Life that we have a chance at winning.

The closest thing we have to a One World Government is the World Trade Organization. This is not a government but an organization of international corporate terrorists who make the rules that member nations must obey or risk economic retaliation. As with all such arrangements, the power players are the ones who profit from war and the tools of war and they call the shots. 

The WTO exists only to maximize profits for the bankers and other war profiteers who do not hesitate to create the conditions where war appears inevitable. If we accept that self-fulfilling prophecy, they will continue to succeed. We must learn to believe that war is not inevitable if the Peoples of the World act as one and demand liberty and justice for all.


Those who enjoyed this blog may be interested in reading the following essays from Stop the Madness: The Diary of a Soldier For Peace in the War to Take Back America: 

DEFANGING TEHRANYSAURUS REX

CLEAR AS ICE


A BRIEF HISTORY OF SLAVERY